Every year on 22 March, the international community marks World Water Day to celebrate the crucial role that water plays in sustaining life on this planet. The day also helps raise public awareness on the importance of water to the development of humanity, and draws focus on the plight of billions of people around the world who still do not have access to safe drinking water.
In Kuwait, we are blessed with availability and access to an abundant supply of freshwater at the twist of a tap, or by taking our pick from the rows of bottled water lined up on supermarket shelves. Not surprisingly, most of us do not stop to think twice about our prodigious consumption of water, its imprudent usage and heedless wastage every day. Underscoring this unconcern, there was hardly a bleat in local media last week on World Water Day about events or comments, if any, that highlighted the critical state of water in the country and the urgent need to conserve and protect this precious commodity.
According to the latest available report from the non-profit global research organization, World Resources Institute (WRI), Kuwait ranks seventh in the list of extreme water-stressed countries in the world. The report also reveals that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, including all six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc, accounts for 12 out of the 17 extremely water-stressed countries worldwide.
Studies also show that despite having one of the lowest per capita access to renewable internal freshwater, estimated at around 70mm per year, Kuwait has the highest water consumption rates worldwide, at around 450 liters per person per day in 2019. Given the paucity of natural water, the heightened water stress and humongous per capita consumption, the appalling indifference shown towards water by people and the authorities is indefensible and inexcusable. Hot summer weather, increasing demand from a growing population, rising per capita income and water-reliant oil activities have been attributed to the excessive consumption of water in Kuwait.
However, more than anything, it is probably the highly subsidized availability of water that has contributed the most to the high average per capita water consumption, and resulted in the unconscionable wastage of this precious commodity.
In a small country such as Kuwait, with less than 18,000 square kilometers of land area, protecting and preserving every square meter of the environment and resources should have been of paramount importance to the authorities. Also, with less than a third of the one percent of the country’s arable land suitable for permanent crops, and this limited productive space depleting at the rate of one percent per annum due to desertification and aridness, the criticality of the environment and ecosystem to food security growns many fold.
One would think that safeguarding resources and conserving available agriculture land would be critical to policy planners. However, the relatively low priority accorded to environment, water usage, conservation and preservation in Kuwait is nothing short of shocking. Kuwait has a hyper arid desert climate characterized by soaring summer temperatures, high evaporation rate from a dry sandy topsoil, and low annual precipitation rates.
Annual rainfall in the country is highly variable with an average of approximately 112 mm, and which could on average vary from 75 to 150 mm per year. The total annual evaporation rate also ranges from 2,500 mm in the coastal areas to more than 4,500 mm inland. The high temperature and evaporation rate along with low rainfall, as well as the absence of any large surface sources of potable water such as lakes or rivers, have combined to make freshwater a scarce if not non-existent commodity in Kuwait.
The exception to this lack in water resources would be the limited fresh groundwater available from Al‐Rawdatain and Umm Al‐Aish fields, which though they have a salinity of 359 ‐1737 mg/l, are available in the form of bottled water.
The report from the World Resources Institute also discloses that in Kuwait and the other 16 extremely water-stressed countries, which is home to one in four of the global population, agriculture, industries and municipalities are together responsible for withdrawing on average more than 80 percent of available water supply every year.
Another study, this time by the World Bank, found that the MENA region is expected to experience the greatest economic losses from climate-related water scarcity, which the Bank estimated at 6-14 percent of GDP by 2050. Kuwait, where natural water supply is low to begin with due to the hot arid climate, and low rainfall, conditions are expected to exacerbate in the coming years from heightened vulnerability to vagaries of climate change.
Currently, the enormous requirement for water from a relatively small population of 4.6 million people in Kuwait are met largely from three main sources — seawater desalination, treated wastewater and brackish groundwater. In 1951, Kuwait became the first country in the world to commission a desalination plant for drinking water production with the launch of a plant in Shuwaikh. Over the decades since then, the number of desalination plants have grown to the current eight plants that stretch along the coast from Sabhiya in the north to Al-Zour in the south.
The installed desalination capacity of around 720 MCM per year from the eight plants account for over 60 percent of total water supply in the country, and for more than 92 percent of the water used for domestic and industrial purposes.
According to the statistical year-book for 2019/2020 published by the Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) total freshwater production was 729 MCM per year in 2019, while gross consumption stood at 730 MCM and daily per capita consumption was 419 liters. Meanwhile, brackish groundwater production was 72 MCM per year in 2019, consumption stood at 63 MCM per year and daily per capita consumption was 36 liters.
Combining the freshwater and groundwater figures we have total gross water production at over 800 MCM per year, annual consumption of around 793 MCM and daily per capita consumption of water of 455 liters. Projections of freshwater demand by MEW indicate that by 2025, demand could range between 722 MCM per year and 3,036 MCM per year. Over this time frame, the installed capacity of desalination plants is expected to reach 3.85 MCM per year by 2024, while demand is expected to increase by 6 percent annually until 2030.
The increasing need for water has made the use of treated municipal wastewater crucial for Kuwait, not only for protecting aquatic ecosystems from the environmental impact that results from discharging untreated wastewater into the sea, but also for reducing the consumption of expensive desalinated water and relieving pressure on the fast depleting limited groundwater.
Available data shows that total municipal wastewater generated from residential, governmental and commercial buildings, as well as surface water.is approximately 1 MCM per day. The per capita wastewater generation — which is increasing by about 3.6 percent annually — is around 155 cubic meters per year.
Nearly three-quarter of the wastewater is expensively treated to reverse osmosis (RO) quality, but only 58 percent is reused, mainly for agricultural irrigation, greenery, landscaping and reforestation. Around 31 percent of the unutilized treated effluent and over 30 percent of untreated wastewater is discharged directly into the sea.
Brackish groundwater drawn from deep wells was once the only source of water in Kuwait, with the country dependent on imported freshwater mainly from Iraq for household consumption. The two main sources of brackish groundwater, referred to as the Kuwait Group and the Dammam aquifers, have a reported salinity that ranges from 4,300 to 10,200 mg/l and from 2,500 to 10,000 mg/l, respectively. Currently, brackish water production is used largely for irrigation and landscaping, as well as to mix with desalinated water to bring it to drinkable quality.
Data from the Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) and other sources indicate that groundwater abstraction, which was around 491 million cubic meters (MCM) in 2010, decreased to 255 MCM per year in 2015, and fell further to 240 MCM per year in 2019. Though the withdrawal rate has decreased measurably over the past decade, it still remains higher than the annual groundwater recharge rate, which is estimated at about 160 MCM. While the decrease in brackish water extraction is commendable, regrettably this has been accompanied by a steady increase in freshwater consumption, including for various purposes other than its main intended purpose as potable water for consumption.
Prolonged and excessive groundwater abstraction over the years, which often exceeded the annual renewable volume, has led to a steady depletion of aquifer storage capacity. The unsustainable water withdrawal has led to not only a decrease in quantity, but also a deterioration in quality through increase in salinity of the groundwater. Moreover, since the government does not levy a charge on use of groundwater supplies, unrestrained withdrawals, wasteful practices and misuse of water have become rampant. Figures from MEW further reveal that of the total water withdrawn annually from groundwater supplies, 54 percent is used for agriculture, 44 percent for municipal purposes and 2 percent for industrial purposes.
The importance of groundwater is likely to increase in coming years and replenishing groundwater could soon prove to be more than a choice but a necessity for Kuwait, as indicated by the theme for this year’s annual United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR), The report, which is launched in conjunction with World Water Day focuses on a different theme each year. The theme selected for 2022, ‘Groundwater: Making the invisible visible’, underlines the challenges and opportunities associated with the development, management and governance of groundwater across the world.
The WWDR notes that groundwater is central to the fight against poverty, to food and water security, to the creation of decent jobs, to socio-economic development, and to the resilience of societies and economies to climate change. Reliance on groundwater will only increase, mainly due to growing water demand by all sectors decreasing surface water sources due to climate change and related variations in rainfall patterns. However, this natural resource is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused.
Despite water paucity and other environmental exigencies, and the urgency to find efficient solutions to these challenges, the gravity of the situation appears to have been lost on the government and the public.
Although Kuwait currently has sufficient strategic reserve stocks to meet any emergencies, and it remains feasible to continue producing desalinated water to meet needs in the short- to medium-term, it is not a tenable long-term solution. With an undiversified economy where income from oil exports is the main source of revenue, continued reliance on energy-intensive, cost-inefficient desalination plants is clearly an unsustainable policy going forward.
Kuwait’s poor water resource management is indicative of some of the huge challenges facing the country, with government policies largely focused on supply-side management. The emphasis at present is mainly on increasing the number and capacity of desalination plants and enhancing strategic reserves, in order to cater to the growing demand. This obviously needs to change; it is imperative that equal if not greater emphasis needs to be paid to demand-side management policies that aim to curb and rationalize consumption patterns and wastage among the public and by businesses.
But meaningful measures to tackle this aspect of water resource management by the authorities have been negligible. The authorities have in recent years embarked on a few initiatives to mitigate and ameliorate the unrestrained usage and wastage of water. But the robustness of response and its timely implementation have left much to be desired, with the government attempts to raise awareness through several water conservation campaigns failing to create sufficient awareness or elicit desired responses among the public.
Education campaigns to promote behavioral change and build greater civic sense among the young is a viable strategy in changing attitudes towards water consumption and conservation over the long term. However, in the near-term there is evidently an urgent need for more effective and efficient strategies to be implemented, including raising prices and removing subsidies on water usage, as well as penalizing water wastage.
While a bill passed by parliament in April 2016, revised and raised water charges to nearly double for businesses and apartments that are generally occupied by foreigners, the bill exempted citizens living in individual homes and villas from any price hikes. The government rationalized the hike in prices as needed to curb consumption by 30 percent, but exempting citizens, who are generally the more profligate users of water from the bill, clearly defeats the intended purpose of the price hike.
A more equitable increase in the price of water, along with a speedy rollout of smart meters that dynamically raise prices based on usage patterns would be appropriate in order to control unnecessary usage and curb wastage of this precious commodity.
Clearly, unless urgent remedial measures are instituted by the government, a growing population, increasing affluence that has led to changing consumption and lifestyle patterns, unsustainable water management policies, and continued unrestrained water consumption patterns that have led to overexploitation and over-pumping of non-renewable water groundwater reserves and straining of desalination plants, will make balancing future water supply and demand a herculean challenge that policymakers in Kuwait will struggle to overcome.